Open Source Beehives

I am personally very interested in this project. I have been on bee keeping intro courses and this winter I bought my first 2 national standard style hives, that are now waiting to be assembled and populated. Designing an open source hardware cnc’able beehive was high up on my list of projects, as and when I had gained enough bee keeping experience. The Open Source Beehive project is already doing a great job and I look forward to building some of these hives and hopefully contributing back to the community with my experiences and feedback.

The project files will be finally released under a creative commons by attribution licence, in support of free culture. I will definitively be adding these beehives to the BarkEng Mad catalogue of free & open products for local manufacture to the residents of Derbyshire, UK…

An important aspect of this project is their alliance and utilisation of the Smart Citizen Arduino compatible platform, enabling them to collect independent data for scientific research into Colony Collapse Disorder. The Smart Citizen is open source, but it is not 100% clear if it is truly open hardware, “free as in freedom”. If you know either way please email and let us know, because licences do matter.

Watch the video and see what you think… The bee population, respective independent research & open source hardware need your support, so follow this link to the Open Source Beehives Indiegogo page and back the project, even if for only £1 (or $1), although I am sure you can afford more than that… 🙂

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